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November 1, 2006
DNA Clears Man in Rape, Judge Rules
New York Times Select, 11/1/2006
A man convicted of rape 25 years ago walked out of a courtroom a free man Tuesday after a judge ruled that he would probably not have been found guilty if DNA testing had been available.
''My faith was tested, and I won,'' said the man, Larry Fuller, 57, who trembled slightly as he left the courthouse carrying two worn Bibles.
After the ruling by Judge Lana McDaniel of District Court, supporters of Mr. Fuller broke out in applause. The assistant district attorney, John Rolater, who was not involved in the original case, apologized to Mr. Fuller.
''Thank you,'' Mr. Fuller said. ''Apology accepted.''
Mr. Fuller was sentenced to 50 years after jurors convicted him of aggravated rape in 1981, finding that he had broken into a woman's apartment and raped her, using a butcher knife to cut her thumb, neck and back as she struggled.
The victim looked at two photo lineups, both of which included Mr. Fuller. She picked him in the second one, even though he was bearded in the picture and she had said her attacker had no facial hair.
At the time, Mr. Fuller was a 32-year-old Vietnam veteran who had received the Air Medal for taking care of his crew. He was pursuing a career in art and had worked as a driver and warehouse employee.
Mr. Fuller had no convictions for sexual assault, but he had pleaded guilty to robbing a convenience store in 1975 and had been sentenced to three years in prison. He served 18 years on the rape conviction. He was released in 1999 but sent back last year for a parole violation.
All the while, Mr. Fuller professed his innocence in the rape case and tried to prove it through DNA. This year, the Dallas County district attorney's office agreed to allow the additional testing.
Mr. Fuller's subsequent exoneration makes him the 10th Dallas County man in five years cleared by DNA testing. More than 20 men have been exonerated in Texas by such testing, according to the Innocence Project. Nationwide, 185 people have been cleared through DNA after their convictions, according to the Innocence Project. In most cases, testimony from mistaken witness identification led to the wrongful conviction, the group said.
November 19, 2006
A Troubled River Mirrors China’s Path to Modernity
New York Times, 11/19/2006
By JIM YARDLEY
DOLKA, China — At the two glacial lakes that give birth to the Yellow River, a Tibetan nomad named Tsende stands at the river’s edge and rolls up his pants. He says a dragon lives in the lakes, a god of rain. Two decades of drought convinced him the dragon is angry.
Tsende steps barefoot into the river, a human speck at an altitude of almost 15,000 feet, swallowed in the emptiness of the Qinghai Province grasslands. He is carrying five silver rings. A nomad on the other side has 20 sheep. They have arranged a trade.
He will travel across grasses that once touched his knees but now barely reach his ankles. Hundreds of nomads, prodded by the government, have sold their herds and fled the land around the lakes. Others like Tsende have rammed a Buddhist prayer pole into a hillside and prayed to the dragon. Told that some scientists offer another explanation for the weather — climate change — Tsende is unimpressed.
“The result is the same,” he said with a shrug.
Science or superstition, the result is the same: The source of the Yellow River, itself the water source for 140 million people in a country of about 1.3 billion, is in crisis, as scientists warn that the glaciers and underground water system feeding the river are gravely threatened. For the rest of China, where the economy has evolved beyond trading rings for sheep, it is the latest burden for a river saturated with pollution and sucked dry by factories, growing cities and farming — with still more growth planned.
For centuries, the Yellow River symbolized the greatness and sorrows of China’s ancient civilization, as emperors equated controlling the river and taming its catastrophic floods with controlling China. Now, the river is a very different symbol — of the dire state of China’s limited resources at a time when the country’s soaring economic growth needs more of everything.
“The Yellow River flows through all these densely populated parts of northern China,” said Liu Shiyin, a scientist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “Without water in northern China, people can’t survive. And the economic development that has been going on cannot continue.”
China’s dynamic economic engine, still roaring at record levels, is at a corrosive crossroads. Pollution is widespread, and a nationwide construction spree, tainted by corruption, is threatening to overheat the economy. China’s leaders, worried about the unbridled growth, are trying to emphasize “sustainable development” even as questions remain about whether the party’s rank and file can carry out priorities like curbing pollution and conserving energy.
The Yellow River, curving through regions only intermittently touched by the country’s boom, offers a tour of the pressures and contradictions bearing down on China, and of the government’s efforts to address them. The river’s twisting 3,400-mile path from the Qinghai grasslands to the Bohai Sea seems to encompass not just thousands of miles but thousands of years — from nomads like Tsende sleeping under tents made of animal hair to urbanites like Peng Guihang, a homemaker living in a new high-rise building in the city of Zhengzhou.
In between, in the ancient, irrigated oasis in the tiny region of Ningxia, farmers plant rice in the desert and treat the Yellow River like a bottomless well. In a pebbled, alien expanse along the river in Inner Mongolia, an enormous industrial region has arisen in only a few years, spewing out so much pollution that a shopkeeper surrounded by factories scoffs at government promises to clean up China.
Most astonishing, cities beside the river like Yinchuan, Luoyang and Zhengzhou — places few Americans have ever heard of — are racing to become China’s next new regional urban center with almost hallucinatory building booms. Yinchuan, a modest, ancient capital, is building an entire city district for a vast government complex and is adding 20 million square feet of construction every year through 2011. Luoyang, once the capital of the Zhou dynasty, has built a cluster of futuristic sports stadiums that look like a grounded armada of metallic, alien spaceships.
From one bend of the river to the next, and the next, an evolutionary chain emerges: nomad to farmer, farm to factory and factory to city. It is the kind of change that other countries have navigated over centuries. In China, it is happening all at the same time.
The Yellow River, then, is like a path into the future. To follow it is to watch China’s struggle to get there.
Climate Change and Drought
It is July, monsoon season at 15,000 feet.
The sky is spitting. Two days earlier, it rained. Nomads hope the dragon is no longer angry. Tsende is sipping a steaming cup of yak-butter tea inside a tent overlooking the frigid blue water of Gyaring Lake. Nomads like Tsende are the descendants of ethnic Tibetans whose families have lived here for generations to when the sparse region was part of Tibet, not China. Even now, many nomads speak no more than a few words of Chinese.
Last year, a local official approached Tsende with an offer: sell his yaks and sheep and move to a township. His family would get a free cinder-block house and an annual stipend of 8,000 yuan, or about $1,000. Local cadres, responding to an edict from Beijing to reduce grazing, offered the same deal to every nomad around the lake.
“They wanted to protect the grasslands,” said Tsende, who like many ethnic Tibetans uses only one name. “They want to move all the nomads into towns, but some nomads are opposed.” He added, “I don’t think overgrazing is the problem.”
Gyaring Lake and its twin, Ngoring Lake, are considered the source of the Yellow River. Scientists began studying the region after drought took hold in the 1980s. Grasslands were turning to desert, raising fears that the river’s source could be endangered. Eventually, overgrazing was deemed to be the root of the problem, and local governments began moving nomads off the land.
More recently, though, Chinese scientists have examined the region and concluded that the pressures from herding are only one part of a much broader problem. Mr. Liu, the hydrologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and other scientists discovered that the complicated water system feeding the lakes was in crisis. Underground water levels were sinking and chains of smaller feeder lakes were receding or drying up altogether. Air temperatures were slowly rising, while the old pattern of two rainy seasons per year was down to one.
“We’ve found that the problem is much broader and is being caused by global climate change,” said Mr. Liu, who is also a professor at the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Institute.
Researchers found that the glaciers feeding the river had shrunk 17 percent in 30 years. Earlier this year, the official New China News Agency reported that glaciers across the entire Qinghai-Tibet plateau, which includes the Yellow River source region, are now melting at a rate of 7 percent a year because of global warming. The report also said average temperatures in Tibet had risen by 2 degrees since the 1980s, according to China’s national weather bureau.
At the source of the Yellow River, Mr. Liu said the combination of less rainfall and warming temperatures had thawed the surface layer of active permafrost and disrupted the underground water channels. Moisture is being absorbed deeper into the warmer ground, and less water is funneling into the Yellow River.
The warming trend has literally moved the ground. Some sections of Highway 214, the two-lane provincial highway, now gently undulate because of melting permafrost. The Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the technological marvel that recently opened as the world’s highest railroad, has already reported track problems from the warming ground surface.
Climate change sounds as strange to a nomad as a dragon god does to a scientist. Yet nomads have been witnesses to what seem to be symptoms. At a chain of lakes known as the Sea of Stars, a nomad in a camouflage jacket described how the shoreline had receded more than 20 yards during the past decade. Other nomads, including Tsende, have noted steadily rising temperatures.
“The temperature has been rising every year,” Tsende said. “It is much warmer now during all four seasons than it was 20 years ago. Sometimes in the winter, the surface of the lake doesn’t even freeze anymore.”
China ranks behind only the United States in carbon dioxide emissions, which scientists consider the raw ingredient of global warming, though that is tricky to explain to a nomad who has never seen a factory. Instead, nomads remember the Han Chinese gold prospectors and fishermen who arrived in the 1980s.
Mining shaved huge scars into the grasslands. Fishermen arrived on donkeys, then later in cars, punching holes into the icy surface of the lakes and slipping nets into the them. At about the same time, drought took hold. Nomads considered the lakes holy and refrained from fishing. They say the local Buddhist holy man, or incarnate lama, warned that the dragon in the lakes was upset that the natural order had been disturbed. The drought lasted 20 years.
“Our Incarnate Lama told us that when the Han Chinese came and started the gold mining and the fishing, it insulted the spirit of the lake,” Tsende said. “He told us that the gold under the earth offered us protection for the grasslands.”
Almost half of the roughly 400 families who once lived around Gyaring Lake have left. In other surrounding regions, the same trend has played out, as thousands of nomads are leaving — though not all of them. Atop a hillside beside Gyaring Lake, nomads have built a tower where people pray to the dragon for rain. Mining and fishing are now banned. Tsende hopes the dragon is satisfied; it is too soon to say if the drought is ending, but this year the rains have improved. He has no plans to leave and has managed to buy the newest nomad status symbol, a motorcycle.
“I think the warmer, the better,” he said of rising temperatures. “Then, there will be more grass.”
Mr. Liu, the scientist, is less sanguine. The entire source region of the river, stretching across different areas of Qinghai, accounts for roughly 40 percent of the water supply in the Yellow River. Rainfall can vary, he said, but other climate trends suggest that the threat to the source of the Yellow River is not going away.
“If the trends that we’re seeing up near the source continue — that the climate is getting dryer and hotter — the river will keep drying up,” he said.
Irrigating the Desert
The tiny, diamond-shaped region known as Ningxia could be the Rhode Island of China. It accounts for less than 1 percent of the country’s population and less than half a percent of its land mass. The terrain is arid and mountainous, and in recent years has been gripped by drought. Not surprisingly, per capita, few places drink more lustily from the Yellow River.
The Yellow River has allowed Ningxia to defy reality for centuries: rice paddies soak in the desert; sunflowers stare up at skies that almost never rain. Today, farmers repeat a phrase handed down for generations, “Tian Xia Huang He Fu Ningxia,” or “The Yellow River Is a Great Gift for Ningxia.”
But is Ningxia a great gift for the rest of China?
Water shortages are at crisis level in many regions. About 400 of China’s 600 cities lack an adequate supply for future growth , and many are now making do by draining underground aquifers to dangerously low levels. Some coastal cities are building desalination plants to turn seawater into drinking water. Over all, China has one of the lowest per capita water supplies in the world and one of the most uneven distributions of water. Northern China is home to 43 percent of the population but only 14 percent of the country’s water supply.
To address that imbalance, the government has begun work on a grandiose, and controversial, “South-to-North” transfer project, which would pump water along channels from the Yangtze River in southern China to replenish the country’s thirsty north, including the Yellow River.
Officials say they believe the plan, potentially the most expensive public works project ever in China, is the best hope for maintaining economic growth in the north, but critics point to practical and environmental concerns, and are fighting to block plans for a channel through Qinghai.
Ningxia, while far too small to blame for the country’s water travails, typifies the challenges China will face as it weighs logic against history in parceling out water. The village of Yingpantan lies in the Yinchuan Plain, a lush green stripe carved by centuries of irrigation. Rice paddies, wheat, corn and groves of red berries known as gouqi provide farmers a comfortable livelihood in a region where rain may fall twice a year.
“We used to be poor, now we are not,” said a farmer, Yang Fengyin, 52. “Water is not a problem here. On the banks of the Yellow River, we’ve never run out of water.”
Told about water problems elsewhere in China, including along many sections of the Yellow River, Mr. Yang was unconvinced. “It’s a rumor,” he said.
Yingpantan Village, built inside the bed of the river, exists solely because during the 1960s the Communist Party under Mao built a dam upstream in neighboring Gansu Province that harnessed the river below. A few doors away from Mr. Yang, a young man studying for the college entrance exam, Chen Shuangquan, told a story that has become family lore, of the raging Yellow River forcing the family onto the rooftops during the 1940s until Mr. Chen’s grandfather, then a young soldier, returned by raft to rescue his relatives.
For the younger Mr. Chen, the tale became a morality play in which the untamed river was a destructive villain and dams were the savior.
“The dams have protected our way of life,” said Mr. Chen, 20, standing less than a mile from the river as mosquitoes swarmed in the humid July air and dusk summoned his neighbors back from the fields.
Dikes and irrigation in Ningxia trace to the beginning of dynastic rule, when the Qin rulers who unified China in 221 B.C. built irrigation for soldiers garrisoned on some of the earliest sections of the Great Wall. Farmers still plant rice on the same paddies tilled roughly 2,000 years ago.
Throughout history the Yellow River has spawned floods, and emperors who could not protect the people were said to have lost heaven’s mandate to rule. The Communist Party has built more dams than any dynasty, and the river is now a top-to-bottom plumbing project that many environmentalists fear is being plumbed to death.
For several years during the 1990s, the river ran so low that it failed to reach the sea. For the moment, engineers have corrected that problem, but the dams and dikes have accentuated a different one: the river is rising into the sky. The huge amount of sediment washing downstream is now pinched by so many dikes and interrupted by so many dams that it is pushing the bed of the river upward, which means as the river goes up, so must the height of dams to prevent floods.
In Ningxia, generations of farmers in villages like Yingpantan have paid no attention to how much water they drained from the river. Their work fulfilled a national priority still evident today, as some Chinese officials sometimes voice fears of China being unable to feed itself. More recently, though, different fears — of not enough water — have prompted the introduction of local conservation efforts. In Yingpantan and nearby villages, irrigation schedules are now announced over public loudspeakers. Rice paddies have been banned in some areas.
But conservation also assumes that demand will not grow, and demand in Ningxia is driven by desperation. Drought is written on the landscape of the arid, lifeless mountains beyond the river’s reach; the name of one mountain village, Hanjiaoshui, roughly translates as Shout for Water. Conservation is becoming a national priority but a recent drought has made finding water a matter of survival for many people in Ningxia.
“People are starving and have no way of living up there,” said Wang Qirong, 64, a farmer in Yingpantan. “You just can’t let people starve. If we have water, we should take it into the mountains in trucks.”
People are already coming down from the mountains. A short drive north of the village, Ma Junqing, a grandfather in a threadbare gray Mao suit, said drought forced him to leave two years ago. He said 100 families from his home county were now leasing wasteland just beyond the edge of the river’s irrigation system. They have built water channels to turn sand into soil, and soil into survival. “There is absolutely nothing in my hometown,” Mr. Ma, 56, said. “It didn’t rain. If it rains, you eat. If it doesn’t rain, you don’t eat.”
Thirsty Factories, Dirty Air
Down a potholed street leading into an industrial park, a brick building that was once part of a forced labor camp is now another sort of prison: the small sundries shop where Zhang Yueqing lives amid the choking pollution of one of China’s newest industrial corridors.
Hulking factories spew blue smoke as hunched men shovel minerals into the red glow of open pit furnaces. They are making coke, silicon and other raw materials to be shipped elsewhere in China, as well as to Europe, Japan, South Korea and the United States. Furnace ash is spread over empty lots like black icing over a cake.
“If you are here in the morning, you’ll see an inch of coal dust on the ground,” said Mr. Zhang, 54. “We cough a lot. At night, sometimes the smoke is so thick that you can turn on your car lights and you still can’t see where you are going.”
His wife, Chen Fengying, 53, added: “We can’t plant anything. We can’t plant tomatoes or hot peppers. They cannot grow.”
The industrial park sits along the river in the region that joins Ningxia and Inner Mongolia, part of an industrial colossus built in less than six years on the arid, water-starved land surrounding the city of Wuhai.
“The kind of development that is happening is abnormal,” said Chen Anping, an advocate for restoring grasslands in Inner Mongolia. “There’s no way this can be sustained. There are not enough resources.”
With one important exception: coal. The northernmost route of the Yellow River courses through the center of China’s coal country. Under the planned economy in 1958, the central government founded Wuhai in the rocky terrain as the coal supplier for the state-owned steel maker, Baotou Steel.
But the collapse of the planned economy almost meant the collapse of Wuhai. By the early 1990s, local officials were debating how to save the city and built three coal-fired power plants to provide electricity to the east. But the city still needed jobs. So officials recruited investors to build the energy-intensive, heavy polluting industries that other regions no longer wanted.
“We told them we have cheap coal, cheap electricity, and if they came and invested here, we could give them land on credit,” said an official in the Wuhai environmental bureau, who explained the city’s history but asked not to be identified for fear of official reprimand.
The strategy worked. Before 1998, Wuhai had four factories. Now, it has more than 400. Wuhai became an industrial model for nearby cities like Shizuishan. In June, the New China News Agency reported that more than $50 billion in industrial development was planned for the 500-mile stretch of the river in Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. Experts estimated that industrial demands for water would quintuple by 2010.
Many investors had arrived in Wuhai with a frontier spirit, heeding the government’s call to develop the west while enticed by the prospect of big profits.
“A lot of people came here and invested their own savings,” said one factory owner who had been in the region for five years. “But they didn’t know it would reach such a scale and that the environmental problems would become so bad.”
Decades of strip mining had already transformed some parts of coal country into vast tracts of denuded wasteland. Rapid industrialization made Wuhai a pollution nightmare. The Yellow River itself was already one of the most polluted rivers in the world. But suddenly clouds of polluted air were drifting hundreds of miles east to Beijing. When a reporter visited the region in late July, the air was so polluted that raindrops left black spots on car windshields.
“The government is in a tough position here,” said the factory owner. “They had nothing. They had to build infrastructure and improve people’s lives. Without these factories, there is nothing.”
This spring, the severity of the pollution problem finally forced official action. The State Environmental Protection Administration closed scores of smaller, dirtier coke factories. Local regulators demanded that other factories install better pollution equipment or face closing.
Some investors felt betrayed. One woman who had invested $1.2 million to build a coke factory but who had no money left to install antipollution equipment committed suicide after it was closed.
But the Wuhai environmental official said the city could no longer ignore pollution. “We are taking it seriously,” he said.
From his vantage point inside the industrial park about an hour from Wuhai, the shopkeeper, Mr. Zhang, said factories belched pollution without restraint. People digging wells now must dig about 260 feet deeper because factories have drained so much underground water. He said local officials did little to stop them.
“They want to collect taxes and attract investment,” he said.
Mr. Zhang said factory managers were adept at duping environmental inspectors. Often, he said, they are tipped in advance of a surprise inspection.
“When someone comes from the prefecture or the provincial government, the owners shut the factories two days in advance,” he said. “Environmental protection costs money.”
A short drive away, a cluster of factories lined a stretch of the Yellow River. Outside one factory, a faded propaganda slogan promised, “Environmental Protection Is Our Country’s First Priority.”
Local residents had said factories sometimes operated at night to avoid environmental oversight. At 6:49 p.m., almost all of the smokestacks were silent. But as the sun later fell behind the Helan Mountains, the silence was broken: 17 smokestacks had just begun a long night’s work.
New Cities Scour for Water
From her fashionable apartment in one of the newest high-rises in the city of Zhengzhou, Peng Guihang is eating a bowl of dumplings in her enclosed balcony. A basketball game is playing on her flat-screen television. Her laptop is open on her marble coffee table. The only thing missing is neighbors. Mrs. Peng and her family are among the first tenants in the unfinished district known as the “new city” of Zhengzhou.
“There is not much here yet,” said Mrs. Peng, seemingly not too worried. “The shops will probably open in two or three years.”
Mrs. Peng is embarrassed by the suggestion that she is living the new Chinese dream, but she is part of a new consumer class that must grow and prosper for China to keep rising. It is for people like her that “new cities” are being built across the country. The view outside her apartment would be astounding if it were not common in many Chinese cities: a horizon filled with rising towers, each 25 stories or taller; a sleek exhibition center built beside an artificial lake splashed with colorful schools of carp; a half-built arts center resembling five massive concrete eggs. Construction cranes filling the sky in all directions.
The end of the Yellow River is still a few hundred miles downstream, but this is the destination China is trying to reach — a nation of peasant farmers transformed into a modern, urban country. And yet so many cities are expanding so quickly, at the same time, and often following much the same blueprint, that China’s urbanization rush has alarmed national leaders and raised fears of overheating. One recent gathering of city planners found that more than 100 cities aspire to become major international cities, while more than 30 cities have requisitioned millions of acres of land to build central business districts.
“Some local officials really don’t understand how to properly urbanize,” said Lu Dadao, a Beijing scholar who specializes in urbanization. “They want it to happen fast, and they want it to be big. They have all taken up urbanization without considering what the natural speed of it should be.”
Along the Yellow River, major cities, and many smaller ones, are in the throes of construction booms, competing to emerge as dominant cities. In Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia, officials are spending about $1.2 billion a year to build a government complex across hundreds of acres. It includes a huge provincial legislature, provincial ministry buildings, a government-owned five-star hotel, a residential compound for foreign entrepreneurs and an outdoor People’s Plaza that can accommodate 30,000 people.
This is a common development blueprint in second-tier Chinese cities: use government money to build government districts in hopes that they will become the equivalent of anchor tenants to attract private real estate development.
“Provincial leaders decided that Yinchuan represents the province,” said Jiang Guanglin, chief of the Yinchuan Construction Bureau. “They want to make it a bigger, more powerful and more beautiful city. They want it to be a regional center.”
But so does Lanzhou, the nearby capital of Gansu Province. And so does Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province, which is on a tributary of the Yellow River. In Luoyang, just a few hundred miles east of Zhengzhou, officials are finishing a government complex as well as apartment and office towers and a sports complex with four arenas for basketball, cycling, target shooting and swimming, as well as a soccer stadium.
Rapid urbanization is already transforming the Yellow River region. Population in the region has nearly tripled since the 1950s. Government statistics show that roughly four billion gallons of wastewater are dumped into the river every year, double the amount from two decades ago. Every growing city, each trying to lure people and industry, is scouring for water. Some are building reservoirs; others are draining so much water from underground aquifers that several cities have reported serious land subsidence.
This summer, the State Council, China’s equivalent of a cabinet, approved national regulations to improve controls over the Yellow River and better regulate water use, partly by raising prices. But officials agree that regulations alone are not enough to compensate for the rapidly rising demand for water. Water saved from farming must be diverted to industry. And cities along the river want to grow like cities on the country’s prospering coast, even though the Yellow River region has none of the same natural advantages.
“The capacity of the river hasn’t changed,” said Su Maolin, a senior engineer with the Yellow River Conservancy Commission. “There is only so much water they can use. It’s already at the maximum capacity of usage.”
The “new city” where Mrs. Peng lives is fashioned after the famed Pudong, the swamp-turned-financial district in Shanghai. In 1992, an elderly Deng Xiaoping visited undeveloped Pudong and exhorted China to build faster and bigger. What followed was an economic explosion that has changed the world. But China’s new leaders are no longer encouraging projects like Pudong. They are trying to tamp down on a runaway economy by ordering provinces to build slower and more judiciously, while cracking down on the corruption endemic to so many projects.
Indeed, so many large construction projects are so infused with corruption that urbanization has become a get-rich scheme for many officials. In the first six months of this year, Chinese prosecutors secured convictions in 1,608 major bribery cases, in which officials accepted kickbacks to facilitate construction projects. A senior official in Beijing was sentenced to death, and then given a reprieve, for embezzling state highway construction funds. In June, a Beijing vice mayor in charge of Olympic construction was removed for embezzlement and kickbacks related to non-Olympic projects.
In Zhengzhou, central government investigators in September found that city officials illegally seized — and then resold, at a handsome profit — thousands of acres of land for a “university town” adjacent to the “new city” project. A month earlier, investigators used satellite technology and found 654 examples of illegal land grabs for construction projects, mostly for local government projects.
This messy, chaotic process is ultimately supposed to help China reach its goal of becoming a “well-off society” by 2040. Mrs. Peng, the tenant in the Zhengdong “new city,” is excited about her family’s new apartment, if reluctant to call herself affluent. Her husband owns a landscaping business, and they are trying to save for college for their two high-school-age sons.
“I’m not one of the rich people,” Mrs. Peng said modestly, looking around her stylish apartment. “This is just very ordinary.”
Her own parents could never have dreamed of such a home, though. Her father worked in the post office and was killed during the Cultural Revolution. She recalled the terror of Red Guards breaking into homes to threaten and harass people. Her widowed mother had to rear five children, and did so without begging. Each has done well — a brother in real estate, another brother working in Beijing, a sister working as a teacher.
“We’re all doing fine,” Mrs. Peng said. She predicts that her neighborhood will be bustling by the year’s end. Her building is apparently already sold out. Others are less certain. Local television stations are filled with advertisements promoting the “new city.” They say the district is the future.
Mrs. Peng, meanwhile, watches through her window as a friend in an adjacent building renovates an apartment. “I can see she has almost finished renovating,” she said. “But I haven’t had the courage to go see it. I don’t want it to be better than mine.”
Jake Hooker and Lin Yang contributed to this article.
December 17, 2006
7 Afghans freed from Guantanamo eager to return home
San Francisco Chronicle, 12/17/2006
By ABDUL WAHEED WAFA, New York Times
(12-17) 04:00 PST Kabul, Afghanistan -- Seven Afghans who were freed after as long as five years at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba arrived in Kabul on Saturday, desperate to get back to their home villages.
The long-bearded men, mostly farmers and simple villagers dressed in dark blue jeans and jackets, arrived at the offices of the Afghan Commission for Peace and Reconciliation in Kabul to receive an official guarantee of freedom from the Afghan government.
Most of them were from Helmand, the southern province that has become the most volatile part of Afghanistan. Government and foreign troops have come under repeated attack there from the Taliban and other insurgents.
One of the seven men, Haji Alef Muhammad, 62, from the Baghran district in Helmand, said he lost his brothers four years ago in a U.S. bombardment of his village. After that, he said, he was taken into custody during a raid and sent to Guantanamo.
"Is this my fault that I believe in the words, 'There is no God but Allah?' '' he asked. "Other than that, there is no witness and no evidence of my guilt.
"We had to eat, pray and go to the toilet in the same cell that was 2 meters long and 2 meters wide," he said in disgust.
Another prisoner, Abdul Rahman, 38, said he was an unwilling fighter for the Taliban. He said he was from Helmand but was arrested in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan in late 2001 by Northern Alliance soldiers led by the Uzbek leader Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum.
"The Taliban sent me there by force, as they made every family provide one fighter or give money instead," he said.
He said he was taken into custody in the city of Kunduz, held in the town of Sheberghan and then "sold" to Americans.
Another returning Afghan, Haji Baridad, who said he did not know his age, spent five years in Guantanamo. He appeared disturbed and kept complaining that an Afghan translator took his money -- 3,600 Pakistani rupees, or about $62 -- when he was detained.
"Ask Hazrat Mojadidi what was our crime?" he said, referring to the head of the Afghan commission.
This was the eighth round of prisoner releases from Guantanamo under a reconciliation program begun 20 months ago by the Afghan government.
Forty-seven Afghans have been released from Guantanamo in that time, and 70 remain. Others are held at the Bagram air base north of Kabul. A new prison wing is under construction in Kabul to house Afghan detainees from Guantanamo who are not freed.
December 23, 2006
U.S. Gives Grants to 4 Gulf Coast States to Upgrade Disaster Housing
New York Times, 12/23/2006
By ERIC LIPTON
FEMA trailers, the cramped, impersonal housing units that have come to define the federal response to major disasters, may be on the way out, thanks to $388 million in federal grants, announced Friday, that will test half a dozen cozier, more permanent models of post-disaster housing.
The program will offer new housing from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to thousands of families, among the 100,000 still living in trailers across the Gulf Coast, by placing them over the coming year in these studier, roomier, better ventilated homes, many of which have front porches, large windows and even small attics.
Mississippi came out on top in the contest for the grants, receiving $280.8 million, compared with $74.5 million for Louisiana, $16.5 million for Texas and $15.7 million for Alabama.
Officials in Louisiana were furious, saying their state, which suffered the greatest losses in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year, had been shortchanged.
''FEMA has clearly learned very little from its mistakes, let alone basic math or a sense of fundamental fairness,'' Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said in a statement.
But officials of the agency said Mississippi's big share simply reflected the creativity of its plans, as the financing was awarded competitively, based on how quickly the new models could be set up, how comfortable and safe they would be and how much they would cost, among other factors.
The grants come from an appropriation in which Congress directed FEMA to take an alternative approach to the customary trailers. The biggest single grant will finance the construction of units in Mississippi that look like A-roofed cottages, featuring a compact front porch, windows on three sides, more storage space and better ventilation. Like the existing trailers, they will be set up on wheels, so they can be driven into a disaster zone.
Louisiana officials, meanwhile, intend to use their grant to build what they are calling Katrina Cottages -- compact single-family homes made of prefabricated panels, with a porch and up to three bedrooms -- in heavily hit areas of New Orleans like Jackson Barracks.
The one model planned in Texas is based on a design that is already used by some 90,000 troops in Iraq. A small house made of prefabricated parts that can be moved by flatbed truck, it can be set up in eight hours by six people. It offers more living space than the trailers and is capable of being elevated so that it can be lifted out of the flood plain.
''It is not going to make the front of Architectural Digest,'' said Gil H. Jamieson, a deputy director of FEMA, ''but it is aesthetically pleasing.''
In some cases, these homes can be built on regular foundations, making them permanent or at least semipermanent housing, unlike the travel trailers, which are not considered sturdy enough to survive winds that could be produced by a tropical storm.
Federal officials said they could not yet predict how many new homes would be built with the available grant money or how many of the 101,000 families still in FEMA travel trailers or mobile homes across the Gulf Coast would be able to move into these new units.
The government will evaluate each of the six types of new homes to be built, to see whether they should be adopted permanently.
Mr. Jamieson said it was unlikely that FEMA would be able to replace the travel trailers completely. But it hopes that by the next major disaster, it will have cut the numbers significantly.
December 25, 2006
Katrina fraud likely to balloon past $1B
Boston Globe, 12/25/2006
By HOPE YEN, Associate Press
WASHINGTON --Already at $1 billion, the tally for Hurricane Katrina waste will balloon next year as investigators shift their attention from fraudulent aid to the lucrative government contracts awarded with little competition.
Several of the contracts were hastily given to politically connected firms in the aftermath of the 2005 storm and were extended without warning months later. Critics say the arrangements promote waste and unfairly hurt small companies.
In January, federal investigators will release the first of several audits examining abuse in more than $12 billion in Katrina contracts. The charges range from political favoritism to limited opportunities for small and minority-owned firms, which initially got only 1.5 percent of the total work.
Currently, half of the government's contracts valued at $500,000 or greater are no-bid.
"Based on their track record, it wouldn't surprise me if we saw another billion more in waste," said Clark Kent Ervin, the Homeland Security Department's inspector general from 2003-2004. "I don't think sufficient progress has been made."
He called it inexcusable that the Bush administration would still have so many no-bid contracts, noting that auditors and Federal Emergency Management Agency director David Paulison himself have said they are prime areas for waste.
"It's a combination of laziness, ineptitude and it may well be nefarious," Ervin said.
FEMA spokesman James McIntyre said the agency was working to fix its mistakes by awarding contracts for future disasters through competitive bidding. Paulison has said he welcomes additional oversight but cautioned against investigations that aren't based on "new evidence and allegations."
"As always, FEMA will work with Congress in all aspects to ensure that we are carrying out the agency's responsibilities," McIntyre said.
Katrina swept ashore on Aug. 29, 2005, in southern Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, leveling homes and businesses along the Gulf Coast. Its storm surge breached levees in New Orleans, unleashing a flood that inundated the city. The hurricane left more than 1,300 people dead, hundreds of thousands homeless and tens of billions of dollars worth of damage.
A series of government investigations in the storm's wake faulted the Bush administration for underestimating the threat and failing to prepare by pre-negotiating contracts for basic supplies in what has become the nation's costliest disaster.
Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Office said its initial estimate of $1 billion in disaster aid waste was "likely understated," citing continuing problems in which FEMA doled out tens of millions of dollars in fraudulent housing assistance.
Democrats in Congress called for more accountability. When they take over in January, at least seven committees plan hearings or other oversight -- from housing to disaster loans -- on how the $88 billion approved for Katrina relief is being spent.
A study earlier this year by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., estimates that hundreds of millions of dollars were likely wasted on contracting, citing instances of double-billing and thousands of trailers meant as emergency housing sitting empty in Arkansas.
Among the current investigations:
-- The propriety of four no-bid contracts together worth $400 million to Shaw Group Inc., Bechtel Group Inc., CH2M Hill Companies Ltd., and Fluor Corp. that were awarded without competition.
The contracts drew immediate criticism because of the companies' extensive political and government ties, prompting a promise last year from Paulison to rebid them. Instead, FEMA rebid only a portion and then extended their contracts once, if not twice -- to $3.4 billion total -- so the firms could finish their remaining Katrina work.
The four companies, which have denied that connections played a factor, were among six that also won new contracts after open bidding in August. The latest contracts are worth up to $250 million each for future disaster work.
-- The propriety of 36 trailer contract awards designated for small and local businesses as part of Paulison's promise to rebid large contracts.
Homeland Security Inspector General Richard Skinner is reviewing whether some small and local businesses were unfairly shut out in favor of winners such as joint venture PRI-DJI. DJI stands for Del-Jen Inc., a subsidiary of Fluor, which has donated more than $930,000 to mostly Republican candidates since 2000.
"It's not what you know, what your expertise is. I don't even believe it's got much to do with price. It's who you know," contends Ken Edmonds, owner of River Parish RV Inc. in Louisiana, a company of 9 people whose application was rejected.
PRI, a minority-owned firm based in San Diego, said it is the "majority partner" with Del-Jen as part of a federal mentoring program offered by the Small Business Administration. The joint venture received four Katrina contracts worth up to $100 million each based on price and "knowledge of work with the federal government," president Frank Loscavio said.
-- Whether small and minority-owned businesses were unfairly hurt after the Bush administration initially waived competition requirements.
For many weeks after the storm, minority firms received 1.5 percent of the total work -- less than one-third of the 5 percent normally required -- because they weren't allowed to bid for many of the emergency contracts.
The National Black Chamber of Commerce called the figure appalling because of the disproportionate number of poor, black people in the stricken Gulf Coast, prompting Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Rep. Donald Manzullo, R-Ill., to request GAO to investigate.
FEMA has since restored many of its competition rules, and the number of contracts given to minority firms is now about 8.8 percent, according to the agency.
Stephen Ellis, vice president of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, said he has no doubt that new reports of significant waste have yet to emerge. The challenge now, he said, is to fight the urge to slacken oversight as Katrina recedes in people's minds.
"In business, people are like sharks -- they smell money in the water," Ellis said. "Companies will continue to swarm at this type of government spending. The incentive is still there to take advantage of free money."
December 28, 2006
Voting rights restored for thousands in state on probation
San Francisco Chronicle, 12/28/2006
By BOB EGELKO
A state appeals court has restored voting rights to as many as 100,000 Californians who are in county jails on probation from felony convictions, and who were disenfranchised by the state a year ago, based on a new legal interpretation.
That interpretation abruptly reversed the state's reading of the law for the previous 30 years, the court noted in last week's ruling. The state's top election official said he will not appeal.
Most of those affected by the decision are young men, typically racial or ethnic minorities, who have committed nonviolent crimes, said Maya Harris, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and a lawyer in the case.
"It sure is nice to have a win for democracy,'' she said after last week's ruling. "We're a state that is very protective of the fundamental right to vote.'' She also said the ACLU has won backing from probation officers who agree that restoring the right to vote helps in inmates' rehabilitation.
Amy Thoma, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, whose decision was overturned by the court, said Wednesday that McPherson was in the process of notifying county election officials about the newly eligible voters. "We're pleased that the court clarified'' the law, she said.
The case involved a provision of the state Constitution denying the right to vote to anyone who is "imprisoned or on parole for the conviction of a felony.''
For 30 years, California's secretary of state, who oversees elections, interpreted that provision as disqualifying only those who were actually in state prison after felony convictions, and those who were on parole supervision after their release.
But last year, McPherson, following a new opinion by Attorney General Bill Lockyer's office, said the ban would apply to another group of convicts: those who had been convicted of felonies -- crimes punishable by more than a year in prison -- but who had been granted probation by the sentencing judge with conditions that included up to a year in a local jail.
Lockyer's opinion said any convicted felon behind bars should be considered "imprisoned'' and thus ineligible to vote. Thoma said McPherson had sought the opinion at the request of an unnamed county election official and was required to follow it.
The ACLU sued on behalf of the League of Women Voters, other voting-rights groups and three San Francisco jail inmates who were put on probation after felony convictions for drug sale or transportation, auto theft and grand theft. They were among 145,000 inmates placed on felony probation in California each year, of whom at least 100,000 are in jail at any one time, their lawyers said.
In a ruling last Thursday, the Court of Appeal in San Francisco said the disqualification of imprisoned felons from voting applies only to those who are sent to prison under the terms prescribed by law for their felonies. Inmates on probation are not serving sentences for felony crimes, but instead are under court supervision and subjected to various restrictions, including a period in jail, the court said.
In the 3-0 ruling, Justice William Stein also said the state constitutional provision at issue was passed by the voters in 1974 to lift some previous restrictions on the right to vote, and should be interpreted in favor of participation in elections.
Judge Sends Katrina Flooding Lawsuit Back to State Court
New York Times, 12/28/2006
By REUTERS
A federal judge has sent back to Mississippi state court a lawsuit demanding that insurers pay flood damages to thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims, a ruling that was opposed by the companies.
Mississippi's attorney general, Jim Hood, said at a news conference yesterday that he was ready to take the case to court but urged the insurers to negotiate a settlement with him and Mississippi residents.
Mr. Hood, who brought the suit on behalf of state residents 15 months ago, said that if insurers did not negotiate settlements by spring, he expected Congress, led by Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, to investigate the industry.
The lawsuit claims that the five insurers had refused to pay for damages from storm surge, a 30-foot-high wall of water that destroyed property worth billions of dollars during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.
The insurers, led by the Allstate Corporation, the State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company and the Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, claimed that flood damages were excluded from their policies and were covered under federal flood insurance.
Nationwide Mutual is the parent of Nationwide Financial Services.
The insurers had wanted the case to be heard in federal court, where judges have ruled against awarding flood damages.
The case now goes to state court in Hinds County, Miss., where it will be decided by a local judge.
''Insurers will be unhappy about this ruling,'' Robert Hartwig, chief economist at the Insurance Information Institute, said.
He said federal judges had already ruled that flood damages were not covered by regular insurance, ''and in the world of courts, precedent is everything.''
The companies expressed disappointment at the ruling.
''But we are confident that the Mississippi state courts will also recognize that flood coverage is excluded,'' a State Farm spokesman, Fraser Engerman, said.
January 3, 2007
FBI Papers Detail Accounts of Abuse at Guantanamo
NPR.org, 1/3/2007
By ARI SHAPIRO
Newly released documents from the FBI contain eyewitness accounts of abuse at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. The descriptions come from interviews with nearly 500 agents who served at the prison.
One agent describes a detainee in an unventilated room where temperatures were well above 100 degrees. He reports, "the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."
Another account describes a long-haired bearded detainee who was "gagged with duct tape that covered much of his head." There are accounts of Koran mistreatment, and of sexual humiliation.
The events took place in 2002 and 2003. The FBI determined that bureau personnel did not mistreat detainees. The report says all the reported incidents involved outside entities, the majority of whom could not be identified.
These documents were released as part of an ACLU lawsuit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top military officials.
[download the documents]
January 9, 2007
Katrina Insurance Trial to Begin
Associated Press, 1/9/2007
GULFPORT, Miss. (AP) -- Even as the Mississippi attorney general negotiates a potential settlement with State Farm Fire & Casualty Co., an eight-person jury will begin hearing opening statements Tuesday in one of hundreds of insurance lawsuits filed by policyholders after Hurricane Katrina.
By seating the jury of four women and four men to hear the lawsuit brought against State Farm by Norman and Genevieve Broussard, U.S. District Judge L.T. Senter Jr. rejected the insurer's bid to move the proceedings to Oxford, Miss., 300 miles from the Gulf Coast.
In court papers filed earlier, State Farm claimed it could not receive a fair trial in south Mississippi because the jury pool has been tainted by ''media propaganda'' about the insurance industry's handling of claims after Katrina. Lawyers for the Broussards have argued that State Farm hasn't met the legal burden for showing that the case must be moved.
A second eight-person panel also was selected Monday for a second Katrina-related lawsuit involving State Farm that is scheduled for trial here later this month.
Meanwhile, State Farm, Mississippi's largest home insurer, is negotiating a multimillion dollar settlement in the state to resolve thousands of lawsuits and other disputed policyholder claims from Hurricane Katrina, people with direct knowledge of the negotiations told The Associated Press on Monday.
Lawyers for Bloomington, Ill.-based State Farm met with Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood as recently as Friday to discuss a possible settlement, which would resolve a civil lawsuit Hood filed against the company for refusing to cover damage from Katrina's storm surge almost 16 months ago.
A mass settlement would be the first of its kind to follow the wave of litigation spawned by Katrina.
Hood, through a spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed. But he issued a statement that said: ''I am working day and night attempting to get our coastal residents a fair shake in the insurance litigation. It would not help our negotiations to disclose any details at this time.''
Hood last month announced that he was trying to negotiate a settlement with several insurance companies, but he didn't specify which ones.
State Farm spokesman Phil Supple said that while no settlement has been reached with Hood, ''we continue to talk and search for ways to bring these events to a resolution.''
State Farm says it already has paid roughly $1.1 billion for about 84,000 property claims in the state, not including flood insurance.
Many policyholders with damage, including those who had coverage from companies other than State Farm, contend that they received nothing or only small payoffs from their homeowner policies because insurers blamed their losses on storm surge, which is not covered, rather than on the hurricane's winds.
Hundreds of Mississippi homeowners have sued their insurance companies for refusing to cover billions of dollars in damage from Katrina's storm surge. The Broussards' case is only the second to be tried since the August 2005 storm destroyed or severely damaged tens of thousands of homes.
The Broussards, whose Biloxi home was reduced to a slab by Katrina, claim a tornado destroyed their home before any flooding.
As jury selection began Monday, Senter dismissed six potential jurors who said they could not be impartial in the case.
''The object is to find eight fair and impartial jurors who will listen attentively to the evidence as it comes in,'' Senter told the jury pool.
All but seven of the 74 remaining potential jurors acknowledged during questioning by State Farm attorneys that their homes had received at least some damage during Katrina. None said they had a claim denied by their insurer, but several acknowledged that they had complaints about the process used to adjust their claims.
State Farm attorney John Banahan of Pascagoula told the potential jurors that it was a daunting task to remain objective ''because we're all gone through something collectively here on the coast.''
Last year, Senter presided over the first trial of a Katrina insurance lawsuit, which Paul and Julie Leonard of Pascagoula filed against Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. Senter's decision in that case, which was heard without a jury, was seen as a victory for the insurance industry.
Senter ruled in August that Nationwide's policies cover damage from a hurricane's wind but not from its rising water, including storm surge. The judge also rejected the Leonards' argument that Nationwide's policies are ambiguous and therefore cannot be enforced because storm surge isn't specifically excluded from coverage.
While a settlement deal with State Farm hasn't been completed, people with knowledge of the talks said both sides were nearing an agreement that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to tens of thousands of State Farm policyholders in Mississippi. The Mississippi settlement would not involve any claims filed by State Farm policyholders in Louisiana or Alabama.
State Farm agreed ''in principle'' to pay an undisclosed amount of money to more than 600 policyholders, including Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., who sued State Farm after the storm, according to the people with knowledge of the negotiations. All the policyholders are represented by a legal team led by high-profile attorney Richard ''Dickie'' Scruggs.
An agreement also could benefit thousands of other Mississippi State Farm policyholders who haven't sued State Farm.
A ''class action resolution'' component of the proposed deal calls for the company to review the claims filed by roughly 35,000 policyholders who live in Mississippi's three coastal counties but didn't file lawsuits against State Farm for refusing to cover storm damage.
After reviewing those claims, the company would be required to make new offers, and any disputes would be heard by an arbitrator whose decision would be binding.
State Farm would pay a minimum of $50 million to these policyholders after their claims are reviewed, but the company could end up paying hundreds of millions of dollars more than that because there wouldn't be a cap on the amount, the people with knowledge of the talks said.
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